Marzena Ciszak 1,2, Diego Comparini 2, Barbara Mazzolai 3, Frantisek Baluska 4, F. Tito Arecchi 1,5, Tamás Vicsek 6, and Stefano Mancuso 2 from
(1) CNR-Istituto Nazionale di Ottica, Florence, Italy; (2) LINV-Department of Plant Soil & Environmental Science, University of Florence, Florence, Italy; (3) Center for Micro-BioRobotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Pontedera (PI), Italy; (4) Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany; (5) Department of Physics, University of Florence, Florence, Italy; (6) Department of Biological Physics, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Abstract
Interactions between individuals that are guided by simple rules can generate swarming behavior. Swarming behavior has been observed in many groups of organisms, including humans, and recent research has revealed that plants also demonstrate social behavior based on mutual interaction with other individuals. However, this behavior has not previously been analyzed in the context of swarming. Here, we show that roots can be influenced by their neighbors to induce a tendency to align the directions of their growth. In the apparently noisy patterns formed by growing roots, episodic alignments are observed as the roots grow close to each other. These events are incompatible with the statistics of purely random growth. We present experimental results and a theoretical model that describes the growth of maize roots in terms of swarming.
